Ariel's Crossing (21 page)

“—then she suddenly got the strangest look on her face, and put her hands up in front of her, and I thought … well, I didn’t know what to think. Then she blacked out. That’s when I called Emergency and rode over in the ambulance with her. I would have phoned sooner, just it all happened so fast.”

“No need to explain, Ariel. If you hadn’t been there, who knows what would’ve happened. She was drinking?”

“Not much.”

Bonnie Jean smirked, raised her eyebrows.

Sam and Ariel sat in the waiting room while Bonnie conferred with the doctor and paid a visit to her mother in intensive care. Wearing rumpled black drawstring pants and the same black tank T-shirt she’d slept in, Ariel knotted her untied tennis shoes, conscious she was being watched. What a morning, what a life. At least it looked like Granna was going to pull through, poor angel. “You’ve grown a lot since I saw you last, Sam. How old are you now?”

“Me? Fifteen, almost.”

“Really,” she said, affecting a diplomatic distance and feigning surprise. “That’s getting there,” her voice cascading into deeper registers, elderly-aunt sounds, she supposed, to ward off his unequivocal gaze at her bralessness.

“Getting where?”

“You know what I mean. Older.”

“We’re all getting there.”

Ariel thought, Shut up, Sam. She rose and walked to the bank of tinted windows, which afforded a mesmerizing view of gnarly ponderosa pines in nearby yards and, beyond, forests, more forests rising above Los Alamos into the Jemez Mountains. She’d driven up there with Granna once, through Douglas firs and lodgepole pines, dizzy from the switchbacks and altitude—nine thousand feet, almost ten—and made it to Valle Caldera at the summit. She remembered being dumbstruck by that vast grassy crater, the product of an eruption some million years ago, whose lava had brought this finger mesa into being—this place where Sam had been born, Bonnie Jean, Brice and Kip, and the atom bomb itself, a pale imitation of such an instance of natural apocalyptics, so dwarfing of human time. Ariel imagined the magma scorching the volcano’s flanks, the enormity of the event as the mountain collapsed, having thrown its very core up into the sky. One surely could have seen its rosy orange blast from the darkness of space. Granna’s God would have seen it and called it good. Let there be light, she thought, unconscious of her right hand that lay flattened against her belly. Now, pregnant Ariel stood here too. Funny, the idea had the momentary weight of epiphany. What could it possibly mean that after she turned her back on the mountain and made her way toward Sam, a nurse crossed her path wearing a plastic name tag that read
Faith?

That evening, after a second visit to the hospital, Ariel had dinner with her relatives. Bonnie Jean’s husband, Charlie, barbecued whatever he could find in the freezer while Bonnie threw together the rest of their impromptu meal. Ariel sat on the patio and held, as best she could, a conversation with her uncle. Not the brightest light bulb, especially in this cerebral county of nuclear physicists and high-tech engineers, Charlie nevertheless possessed what her grandmother would call a sweet spirit. Potted geraniums and petunias stood at every extremity of the modest backyard, and though she loathed geraniums and petunias, Ariel complimented him on them. Long day. Keep the peace.

“It’d give Bonnie a boost to know you like them. Some are as old as the Hill itself, swear to you. They’re her pride and joy,” he somewhat mournfully smiled and sat down at the pebbled green-glass table with his niece, who was sipping a lemonade from concentrate. “She says you’ll be staying a while.”

One was perennial, the other annual. Not as old as the Hill.

“I’d like to stick around until Granna’s better. But only if it isn’t an imposition.”

“Not hardly. You’re family.”

“It’s good news they say she’s going to be okay.”

“Myself, I’m more scared of hospitals than sickness itself.”

“She seems in good hands.”

“Never liked hospitals,” Charlie concluded.

Amid the mayhem, Ariel tried phoning her parents a few times but never reached them. Well aware of Bonnie’s long-standing animosity toward Brice, she nonetheless thought it odd that her aunt hadn’t mentioned his name all day. She decided, however, to cut the woman some slack, distraught as she was beyond distraction. Bonnie’s first thought would be not of her brother but her mother, who lay in the hospital, frightened surely, sedated, attached to a cardiac monitor.

Bonnie Jean clearly still considered Brice the boy who’d left the Hill for the big city back east, the man who’d disenfranchised his family and the community that had given him so much. If it was true that one could never go home again, Ariel thought, maybe it was because the people left behind never discarded their sense of having been abandoned. She wasn’t surprised when Bonnie, after thanking her for complimenting the flower garden, finally mentioned her brother by vaguely dismissing the need to telephone him that night. Why not wait a day or two, until they really knew something concrete about their mother’s affliction? No need to bother Brice until they had some specifics.

“We have specifics to tell him now, Aunt Bonnie.”

“Not really. We don’t have a prognosis.”

“Very mild stroke. A little rest and she’ll be back home better than ever.”

“This will put the kibosh on her smoking and drinking, anyway.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll call him tonight. He’ll want to know.”

“You go ahead, Ariel,” said Charlie, not looking at his wife. “And tell your father everything’s under control.”

The three of them ate, Sam having rambled off with friends to play WarZone 2100, a video game they considered ultracool for Hill kids to access, given its premise of rebuilding life after global nuclear devastation. Ariel asked after Sam’s older brother, Charlie junior, who was rock climbing up in Eldorado Springs, having grown up in a hurry since his cousin saw him last. Conversation ran calmly at variance with the day. They sat, each abstracted.

“These pork chops are perfect,” said Ariel, filling a lull.

Bonnie Jean agreed with her niece.

“You’re not eating very much,” Charlie noticed.

“I guess I’m not that hungry.” Soft warm air rose from the canyon below. Religious music downloaded at random from a satellite piped through the television in a room off the patio. John Tavener’s
The Protecting Veil,
with its cadences of Russian Orthodox chant. “Granna would like this,” she said.

“Poor thing,” Bonnie whispered, then pulled herself together, moved the subject away from her mother.

So then. What was Ariel up to in New Mexico? Did Bonnie Jean know a man named Kip? Kip Calder,
know
him? No offense to Charlie here but there was a time in her life when she thought she was in love with Kip Calder, believed that he and she might even get married one day. He was a little too much like Brice, though. Always running, always skipping out on family and home. Well, at least he served his country when the time came. Like Dad did with his work here in Los Alamos. And served, she’d heard rumor say, with distinction. Again, no offense but he’d been an extremely handsome young man, just a little touched is all, but then who isn’t? Kip Calder. The last time Brice was here, he’d mentioned something about Kip.

“Did they ever have their reunion?” she asked, leaving Ariel in a perfect limbo between telling and denying her one truth that might lead to others she hadn’t the strength this night to address.

Scents of concession food wafted on azure smoke. Toasted corncobs in blackened husks and hot salted piñole nuts. An aroma of burned coffee mingled with the smell of sausages stewed in jalepeños on a Bunsen burner stove. Cactus candy, used clothes, mildewed books. Under a wide sky, people pawed through piles of stuff, bartered, hustled, peeled off bills and placed them in hands. Beyond that ridge was the opera house, standing empty today but only last week filled with an audience come to hear Stravinsky’s
The Rake’s Progress.
Sets now struck, orchestra and singers all gone home, and the aria

They go a-riding

Whom do they meet?

Three scarecrows

And a pair of feet …

carried off by desert breezes.

What remained were businessfolk and bargain hunters. Old hippies, road people. Honest antiquers and hucksters who’d given up dealing pot for the purity of caravaning the Southwest from fair to fair, selling nothing new under the sun, their wares spread out on blankets or under the tarpaulin shade of stalls. Here was a rarity, a bull-pizzle walking stick. There were Hopi moccasins, Navajo squash blossoms. Mickey Mouse memorabilia, a portrait of Elvis on black velvet. Bulovas from the forties, when somebody’s young daddy had fallen charging the beach at Normandy, his watch just like this one, still ticking on a lifeless seawashed wrist.

And here was Kip communing with these artifacts and feeling somewhat artifactual himself, wandering the rows of merchandisers, gazing at their recycled arcana, their fur hats that wouldn’t fit any head, their sheep bells from Pakistan, their scratchy vinyls of John Denver and The Doors. Franny and Marcos followed, holding hands, poking through the relics, too. Kip bought a kerosene lamp for three dollars. He haggled down the price of a green rain slicker. Marcos got Franny a nice old piece of goldblack-veined turquoise mounted on a silver bracelet. They ate fresh tortillas and Marcos gnawed on came seca—venison or beef, he couldn’t tell which, really, so spiced was the shredded meat that stuck in his teeth. Kip found a sheepskin rug that would go beside the bed he and Marcos had welded back together earlier that same morning, as well as some army blankets, chairs, and a chest of drawers. Things to outfit the fieldhouse. And Franny bought Kip a battered painting from Mexico, on a warped piece of tin, for him to hang in his sitting room. A saint spearing a dragon.

“Housewarming present,” she said, handing it to him with the warmest smile Kip had yet seen on her face, as they drove back to Pajarito in the pickup with their finds. “I thought he kind of resembled you. The saint, I mean.”

Next day, Marcos helped Kip carry these new furnishings down through the lower pasture. Moving out of the main house, the man found himself in a bittersweet mood. These had been some of the best months of his life, his mind never so unclouded. Superstitious in his way, Kip worried that now that he had nearly completed the task he’d set himself, his usefulness here was concluded and the old demons that had been kept in abeyance might move into the field-house with him. Too, he wondered what living apart from the Montoyas would be like. Of course, he’d still take his meals with them and continue working for Carl. But this sworn outsider had grown used to being near the others. His natural will to run away from everyone and everything had unusually slackened as he’d matured, like some grafted limb, into the Montoya family tree. Damn strange sensation.

The camaraderie of working with the others would be lost as well. Through spring and into August, everyone at Pajarito had managed to help. What Kip didn’t know how to do, Carl did; what Carl didn’t know, Marcos did; what Marcos didn’t, Sarah or Franny did. Even the structure itself, after a fashion, informed its restorers how to renew it. Sun-dried bricks of strawstrewn mud had been replaced here and there, covered with adobe and lime set coats. Window openings had been fitted with fresh glass, their facings and lintels painted tomato red because that was the paint color Carl happened to have in a can left over from another project. There were some touches still to add, but the project was winding down. Marcos had found shutters in a storage room and, after stowing the new furniture and other gear, he and Kip sat down to scrape off the old blue paint together in cottonwood shade, alone for the first time since Franny had moved in.

“So when are you two getting married?” Kip asked with a sly grin.

That was unexpected, but Marcos, being a horseman, knew how to respond to unexpected moves. “Franny’s keeping her apartment for a while, you know.”

“Is that a good thing or bad?”

“Tell me, Kip. Have you ever been married?”

“I suppose you could say I have.”

“How can you suppose you’ve been married? It’s like being alive or dead. You’re either married or not.”

“You’re forgetting about comas and trial separations.”

Smart-aleck duffer. Marcos waited for more.

“I’m married to someone I’ll never see again. That’s all.”

“Because you don’t want to or because she doesn’t?”

“Because because.”

“You must have had a bad falling-out.”

“No, just two people worlds apart not meant to be together. I don’t know if she’d even recognize me. We didn’t get married for love, anyway. It had to do with American citizenship for her children.”

Letting that one go, Marcos asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

“I had my chance once, when I was about your age.”

“And?”

“And I missed it.”

Marcos wanted to ask but sensed from Kip’s voice, its hushed depth, that this was another subject best left alone. “Sorry things didn’t work out for you.”

“Things worked out like they were supposed to. They always do.”

“Always?”

“Always. It’s inevitable.”

Time passed as the dirt beneath their bench became slowly cluttered with blue chips of old paint, which now looked for all the world like a pile of dusty once-iridescent butterflies. Kip tucked a fresh piece of sandpaper into the block, tightened the wing nuts, and began stroking the scraped wood.

“You and Franny seem perfect for each other.”

“You think?”

Kip hummed, his mind moving away from the subject he’d come close to broaching. He wished to keep his promise to Mary but hoped somehow to inspire Marcos in the direction of discovering a path into her truer life. Franny hadn’t been fabricated for no good reason, nor was Mary’s apparent love for Marcos without foundation. Any former professional spook would know that secrets were sometimes founded on principle. But still, he wondered how much longer Mary was going to hold out. A prop plane passed overhead and Kip glanced up to watch it surrey across the sky. Cessna. He’d flown one of them years ago, taken his Vietnamese stepsons up for a whirl. He remembered their gaping mouths and excited chatter. Nice kids, but he’d known them no better than he knew most anybody else. Everything but this given moment seemed so far away, so long ago.